How do I make an outgoing socket to a SPECIFIC network interface?

Question

I have a server with two different network interfaces, each with a different IP address. How can I create a socket so it\'ll go out a specific IP address?

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Answer 1

You can certainly bind a socket to a specific device.

I don't know how to do it in python, but using the berkeley socket api (in C) you need to call setsockopt(), using the option SO_BINDTODEVICE.

You pass in an interface descriptor, which is of type struct ifreq. Ideally you would get the contents of the interface descriptor by using ioctl(), and requesting SIOCGIFINDEX - passing the name of the interface (eg. eth0) as an argument.

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edit: Just did a quick search and found this documentation of the socket methods in python. setsockopt() is amongst them.